Sunday, June 29, 2014

Congratulations to Mary Turley-McGrath for winning the Trócaire/Poetry Ireland Award for her poem 'Valley of
the Birches'. No doubt she will produce some more great work at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre which was the coveted prize. Mary took some time to give me her thoughts on Hellkite. Many thanks Mary for that. I really appreciate such a personal response.

Hellkite

I really enjoyed these stories though few of them made me smile. They
are deeply reflective pieces on human behaviour and relationships moving from
the interpersonal to the intrapersonal. The characters and situations are true
to the world we live in with all its ambiguities and contradictions.

The writing is convincing, persuasive and direct so that I feel I am
being taken into the deeper regions of the human psyche where extraordinary
things happen to men, women and children. Circumstances, random events, and past histories influence the
characters in the actions and choices and in each story a major shift takes
place between the start and finish; perhaps this is why there is at the end of
many of the stories the possibility of redemption, or even some happiness for
the tortured soul of the protagonist.

Short stories do not have the luxury of back story…they are more like a
cross sections of lives. I find these cross sections reveal isolation, anger,
despair, rejection and loneliness bordering in some places on alienation. Yet
these stories are not devoid of love and affection. The characters in ‘The
Street with Looking-Glass Eyes’ are bound together by tragedy but also by a
deep affection; they live in an imaginary fairy tale world which seems about to
end.

The man in ‘Once Bitten’ is mysterious and secretive and his behaviour
is extraordinary; he is at odds with himself in many ways, seems to have
studied history and works in accountancy; quite intriguing, living in a surreal
world through the letters he writes and receives from an ‘old flame’. Perhaps
he needs to come to terms with his past and accept his imperfections. Quite an
enigma! This story has a filmic quality, very vivid and is perhaps my
favourite.

In ‘Apidea’, Hilary and Ambrose are dealing with mutual loneliness; both
have been abandoned by their children and have developed an interdependence
which sustains them both through and interest and fascination for bees. (This
reminds me of Sylvia Plath’s, ‘The Bee Box’ and and Carol Ann Duffy’s recent
collection The Bees.)The need for human contact and
understanding is at the heart of ‘The Call’. The swans become Kieran’s family
after his sister destroys his chances of finding a wife and subjects him to a
life together with her without a word spoken. Perhaps here, the issue is one of
self protection for the sister and not as deliberately vengeful as Cora’s
premeditated attack on Doyle’s prospects for happiness in the future, in
‘Hellkite’. Her treatment of her ex-husband is inexplicably cruel, just as the
change in the character in ‘Foraging’ takes on an extraordinary turn.

The gradual transformation in his person is very well handled and rather
Kafkaesque to say the least. Yet I found a layer of humour in this story which
I did not find elsewhere; I think it came with the tone adopted by the
narrator…four stories I think are first person…this one does very well in first
person. I feel there is a tongue in cheek element to it!

There were two stories that I did not quite get, ‘Drinking his Strength Back’ and ‘Feeding the Wolf of Lies’

On the other hand ‘The Devil’s Dye’ is short, descriptive, emotional,
poetic and powerful as if the girl is on the point of desperation.

I expected this book of stories to be one thing but found a multitude of
facets and situations and characters. It gave me a lot of things to think about.
Wonderful piece of work Congratulations
again.

Friday, June 20, 2014

SINCE 2001,
Geraldine Mills has published six books - each its own particular kind
of gem - and yet she is much less famous than she should be.

If Mills spent less time fine tuning her writing, and more
networking, then I have no doubt she would have at least been
long-listed for the Man Booker Prize by now.
Literary networking is like prostitution, only with lower ethical
standards and far inferior levels of customer satisfaction. Geraldine
Mills happily leaves this darkest of arts to the professionals. Instead,
she works away at stories and poems, which are honest about the awful,
and blackly hilarious, stuff of life in a way that is often scary.Hellkite, published by Arlen House, is her third collection
of short-stories. Her prose is up there with that of George Orwell and
Jonathan Swift, in that it is always clear as a window that has just
been washed, with not a word added for merely decorative purposes.
The first sentence of the collection’s opener, Centre Of A Small Hell,
is a perfect illustration of this quality: “The morning after his
wife’s ashes were brought home, Bernard Curran took a sledgehammer to
the hunting table out there in the yard where the air was still enough
for snow.”
These are sad, laughable, stories of lives gone so ragged things are liable, at any moment, to get a little sinister. In The Best Man For The Job,
the henpecked Jimmy thinks he hears “bouncing out in the garden”;
hardly ever a good thing, in my limited experience. His wife, Dolores,
tells him “It’s just your tinnitus acting up again”. Jimmy goes outside
to find a man older than himself jumping up and down on his
granddaughter’s trampoline:
“‘Good evening, sir’, he said, in such a polite voice you could tell
he wasn’t from around these parts. ‘If I may be so bold to say, this is a
high-quality trampoline. It has put some much needed Je ne sais quoi
back into me’.”
This is a scene worthy of David Lynch. A man is in bed, minding his
own business, when his peace is disturbed by a probable Fine Gael voter
jumping up and down on his grand-daughter’s trampoline in the middle of
the night.
This has never happened to me. But I somehow know how Jimmy feels. It
is a great metaphor for the way we are, as we go on, constantly
assaulted by strangeness just at that point when life looked as if it
might be about to calm down for a bit.
Another fantastic story is, Foraging, in which yet another
of Mills’ beleaguered males of a certain age is given a gift voucher by
his wife for a night class titled: Beginners Guide to Avoiding Adultery.
In this book, Geraldine Mills takes us roughly by the hand, as she
forensically examines the strange and terrible places which most of us
have at least visited, and where some of us live all the time.

About Geraldine Mills

A native of Galway, Geraldine is a poet and short story writer with four collections of poetry and three of short fiction. Arlen House has published her short fiction collections, Lick of the Lizard (2005) and The Weight of Feathers(2007) and her most recent collection 'Hellkite' which are available internationally from www.kennys.ie and Syracuse University Press and have been taught at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University. Her poetry collections include 'Unearthing your Own' (2001) and 'Toil the Dark Harvest' (2004) which were published by Bradshaw Books, Cork. 'An Urgency of Stars' published by Arlen House, 2010 was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. Arlen House was also the publisher of 'The Other Side of Longing', a collaboration with U.S. poet Lisa C.Taylor which was the Gerson Reading choice for the University of Connecticut April 2010.
Geraldine is a mentor with NUI Galway and an online tutor with Creative Writing Ink. Her first children's novel titled 'Gold' has just been published by Little Island. It is suitable for children 9+.